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Baulderstone said:
Thinking further about this, while I'm not Chinese, I am a resident alien living in the US, and thanks to being regular on BedrockBrendan BedrockBrendan 's Wuxia Workshop, I have streamed hundreds of Chinese movies in the last few years. Maybe these things triggered some algorithm. As to how they got my number, I'm a real estate agent. It's a requirement of my occupation to keep my cell number as public as possible.
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it is remarkably easy to target folks with the right set of information. People naturally cluster up around particular interests or Behaviors. I mean, all of us here, if you look at the poll, are incredibly homogenous. You’d have something like a 90% chance of guessing race and age just by frequency of visiting this website.
 
Raleel said:
it is remarkably easy to target folks with the right set of information. People naturally cluster up around particular interests or Behaviors. I mean, all of us here, if you look at the poll, are incredibly homogenous. You’d have something like a 90% chance of guessing race and age just by frequency of visiting this website.
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Should we rename it theRPGmoatlyGuysBornNear1970probablyWhitePub?
I think the domain name is available.
 
Tulpa Girl said:
Welcome to Georgia. Even the lightest of snows completely fucks things up, because the infrastructure isn't designed or equipped to deal with it, and because everybody loses their goddamned minds when trying to drive in it.
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At least you get snow - it's a rarity in Australia, let alone here in Queensland.

What we would give for a White Christmas...
 
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Dumarest said:
You call 'em car wrecks; I call 'em job security. :wink:
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I wanted to ask you something because I’ve discussed this with other people. What’s going to happen to the auto insurance when cars all are self-driving? I actually can’t wait for that to happen because I was rear-ended by a lady a couple years ago who I am pretty sure waa using her phone. I read somewhere that the amount of accidents will decrease by 90%.
 
Endless Flight said:
I wanted to ask you something because I’ve discussed this with other people. What’s going to happen to the auto insurance when cars all are self-driving? I actually can’t wait for that to happen because I was rear-ended by a lady a couple years ago who I am pretty sure waa using her phone. I read somewhere that the amount of accidents will decrease by 90%.
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Nobody I know is worried about it because nobody's managed to come up with a self-driving vehicle that (1) actually performs as claimed and (2) convincing people to turn control over to a machine will take some doing. I'm betting it won't happen in our lifetimes. Maybe when Doc Sammy Doc Sammy is finally old enough to drive, he won't need to anymore. :wink:
 
Dumarest said:
Nobody I know is worried about it because nobody's managed to come up with a self-driving vehicle that (1) actually performs as claimed and (2) convincing people to turn control over to a machine will take some doing. I'm betting it won't happen in our lifetimes. Maybe when Doc Sammy Doc Sammy is finally old enough to drive, he won't need to anymore. :wink:
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as an owner of a self driving vehicle, it’s pretty fantastic, but it’s currently driving like a teen’s first day behind the wheel. I did summon mine to come and pick me up in the parking lot gratuitously yesterday. It took longer than it too walk over, but it is pretty neat.

my wife is one of those people who will take some convincing, and she has multiple degrees In technical fields. She fights it on road trips where it really shines. However, on my commute every morning it’s pretty darn good. Not perfect, but surprisingly solid when you consider where you were 3 years ago.

as with most things I chime in on, I can talk at length ;)
 
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I don’t think it’s going to take much convincing to get people on board to self-driving cars. “You can sleep, eat, look at Facebook, or put on your makeup instead of paying attention behind the wheel.” In actuality, the speed limits will probably be able to go up and people will get to their destinations faster than before.
 
What makes me think this is one technology that will be adopted more quickly once it works at an affordable level is the elderly. Normally that's a group you can count on to resist change. In this case it gives them back freedom as they either become less comfortable driving or are forced to stop driving. I see them on the eager to see happen side
 
Going to a Halloween party on Saturday, and I have no idea what my costume will be. My best friend pointed out that since I already have long, blond hair and a beard, it wouldn't be too hard for me to go as Thor. He may be on to something...

Or maybe The Dude from The Big Lebowski.
 
Bunch said:
What makes me think this is one technology that will be adopted more quickly once it works at an affordable level is the elderly. Normally that's a group you can count on to resist change. In this case it gives them back freedom as they either become less comfortable driving or are forced to stop driving. I see them on the eager to see happen side
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Yes, I run the life drawing sessions for a local art association, and they are at night. There are a fair number of retired artists that come to the sessions, but they all reach a point where they have to quit coming or get rides as their night vision fails them. It's always sad to see them give up something they love doing.

As far as adopting technology, most retirees around here have laptops, smartphones and tablets, and a lot of them use Alexa. While they aren't as tech literate as teenagers, a lot of them are as keen to have the latest toy for social status.
Ronnie Sanford said:
Well if you guys wouldn't switch Winter for Summer months it would help :-)
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Speaking as someone from Sydney, switching the seasons wouldn't help us get a white Christmas in the least.
 
Raleel said:
my wife is one of those people who will take some convincing, and she has multiple degrees In technical fields. She fights it on road trips where it really shines. However, on my commute every morning it’s pretty darn good. Not perfect, but surprisingly solid when you consider where you were 3 years ago.
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They're going to be very strictly tested, but they will also be a huge target for attackers and getting physical access isn't too hard as cars tend to be left alone for long periods of time. I'm sure the switch will be in my lifetime, but I can see myself being one of the holdouts.
 
E-Rocker said:
Going to a Halloween party on Saturday, and I have no idea what my costume will be. My best friend pointed out that since I already have long, blond hair and a beard, it wouldn't be too hard for me to go as Thor. He may be on to something...

Or maybe The Dude from The Big Lebowski.
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Combine the two. Beergut Thor from Endgame.
 
Ladybird said:
They're going to be very strictly tested, but they will also be a huge target for attackers and getting physical access isn't too hard as cars tend to be left alone for long periods of time. I'm sure the switch will be in my lifetime, but I can see myself being one of the holdouts.
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I fullt Expect the car will drive me to see the grandkids, or I will be able to send it over to get them and bring them over. My son is looking forward to relaxing and letting the car drive him around.

and ya, lots of testing and targeting. Folks are already doing things to try and trick them.
 
I love stuff like the salt circle, but ultimately that's just playing about. The big money is, as it was with computers and smartphones and any other connected tech that becomes ubiquitous, going to be coming from organised crime and government agencies; something like cryptolocker viruses are annoying but ultimately not life threatening, whereas a fleet of self-driving missiles or kidnapping machines are something else.

And, you know, I'm not a criminal, I don't have a hit list, I haven't put much thought into what I could use these for; but there are plenty of evil people who are, do, and have.
 
Ladybird said:
I love stuff like the salt circle, but ultimately that's just playing about. The big money is, as it was with computers and smartphones and any other connected tech that becomes ubiquitous, going to be coming from organised crime and government agencies; something like cryptolocker viruses are annoying but ultimately not life threatening, whereas a fleet of self-driving missiles or kidnapping machines are something else.

And, you know, I'm not a criminal, I don't have a hit list, I haven't put much thought into what I could use these for; but there are plenty of evil people who are, do, and have.
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Not to mention several hundred kg of highly flammable lithium batteries dependent on software to prevent them from cooking off.
 
so public transit in my city is threatening a union strike on Friday, which would seriously fuck up my life :sad:
 
and this edition of the Northern California Electricity Appreciation Festival has come to an end at approximately 14:30 hrs, at least for this participant.

Yesterday it was announced that power was unlikely to be restored in the county until Friday at the earliest, so at the request of Mrs Toadmaster who was missing out on all kinds of 10th Anniversary League of Legends swag we went out generator shopping (not expecting much).
We scored arriving at Home Depot right after they had taken delivery of a stack of Ryobi 2300 watt generators. Not my first choice, I'm a big fan of the Hondas, but beggars can't be choosers and at $599 it was half the price of the similar sized Honda model. Ryobi is inexpensive, but in my experience, light duty, not junk. Home Depot had a stack of these, maybe 30-40 at the customer service counter. We had a few other things to get so did our other shopping (10-15 minutes) then returned for a generator. In that time they had already sold probably 2/3 to 3/4 of the stack since we had come in.

We stopped by the house and fired up the generator to get the refrigerator going, and too see if the wi-fi was going to work (it did), then with the children happily wi-fi-d we headed off to buy some funnels and a lock and chain to keep our new purchase from growing legs. We went to Tractor Supply who was open but with no power, so an employee would escort customers around the store with a flashlight. Knowing she was not going to lose all that League of Legends swag my wife's mood was greatly improved and she could start to appreciate the adventure. We commented how much it was like shopping in a zombie movie. I told my wife she needed her Cricket Bat (her melee weapon of choice in Left 4 Dead).

I was immediately reminded of this Rob Zombie video, my wife used to do Roller Derby and likes the cricket bat so it always make me think of her.




This experience has made me into something of a connoisseur of the humble grilled cheese sandwich, simple to make, warm and delicious. Kraft makes a chedder / mozzarella blend that turns into a lovely gooey mass on the bread.


As far as the Ryobi generator, I only have about 14 hours on it, but not bad. Not as quiet as the Hondas, but still pretty quiet. It ran 8+ hours on a gallon of gas, powered up the fridge, my wife's mondo computer, a laptop, a large LED light (stole on of the hanging 48" LED tube lights out of my shop) and charged a variety handheld electronics. I actually have no complaints and for that price you could do much worse.




Dumarest said:
Nobody I know is worried about it because nobody's managed to come up with a self-driving vehicle that (1) actually performs as claimed and (2) convincing people to turn control over to a machine will take some doing. I'm betting it won't happen in our lifetimes. Maybe when Doc Sammy Doc Sammy is finally old enough to drive, he won't need to anymore. :wink:
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I look at the railroads, they are on freaking rails, about as simple a guidance system as there is and for the most part there is still a human operator overseeing the operation. Cars have way more to deal with, and something I've not seen addressed, is who is responsible when something goes wrong? The "passenger?

The companies behind autonomous vehicles have very deep pockets making them far more attractive legal targets, I can only imagine how juicy they will be for lawyers if there is even a hint of a "glitch" in the programming that leads to a death. Uber was pretty quick to settle with the family of the woman that their car ran over last year, and the State of Arizona which had been very friendly to the autonomous car developers slapped on a bunch of new requirements to cover their butts. Tesla has been very clear that their system is a driver assist, not a fully autonomous system.

I can certainly see the appeal for those who can't physically drive, but typically those people don't have a lot of money making them an unlikely customer. Those with money already have a form of self driving car available, it is called a chauffeur (ever see Driving Miss Daisy?).
 
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Toadmaster said:
The companies behind autonomous vehicles have very deep pockets making them far more attractive legal targets, I can only imagine how juicy they will be for lawyers if there is even a hint of a "glitch" in the programming that leads to a death. Uber was pretty quick to settle with the family of the woman that their car ran over last year, and the State of Arizona which had been very friendly to the autonomous car developers slapped on a bunch of new requirements to cover their butts. Tesla has been very clear that their system is a driver assist, not a fully autonomous system.
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That's a large part of why I don't expect them to become common in my lifetime.
 
Dumarest said:
That's a large part of why I don't expect them to become common in my lifetime.
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If the accident rate looks to be lower than a human driver wouldn't you say something is wrong with a system that favors more death and accidents and injury over one with lower rates?

We already have deep pockets. Insurance companies could be argued as the primary cause for rising lawsuits since they pool otherwise dispersed money into one loct.
 
Toadmaster said:
Uber was pretty quick to settle with the family of the woman that their car ran over last year, and the State of Arizona which had been very friendly to the autonomous car developers slapped on a bunch of new requirements to cover their butts.
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In this case, Uber had a person behind the wheel, it was demonstrated that person wasn't doing their job and monitoring the car.

Bunch said:
We already have deep pockets. Insurance companies could be argued as the primary cause for rising lawsuits since they pool otherwise dispersed money into one loct.
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this is supported by some economic theory - it's not just a pooling of resources, but also a dissociation of the costs from the insured.
 
Some more Inktober updates...(obviously not going to finish this in October, but I think I will finish it, it's been fun and a bit of art is a great brain palette cleanser from all the math in school)

Anyways, here's Prompt #17 Ornament, #18 Misfit, and #19 Sling

Scan_20191031 rs.jpgScan_20191031(2) rsz.jpg

Scan_20191031(3)rsz.jpg
 
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Raleel said:
In this case, Uber had a person behind the wheel, it was demonstrated that person wasn't doing their job and monitoring the car.



this is supported by some economic theory - it's not just a pooling of resources, but also a dissociation of the costs from the insured.
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The person that is supposedly not needed? Even at that she seemed to react, just too slowly to prevent the accident, the car never responded at all until after it hit the pedestrian.

Uber had lots of issues. One being their tech just doesn't work that well, it requires intervention at a rate many times higher than its competitors (like 10s of miles vs thousands of miles for Google).

It was also found that the Volvo they had modified probably would have avoided the accident with a human driver and its driver assist features, had Uber not disabled them. Of the 3 companies heavily invested Uber is clearly at the back of the pack and cutting corners.

One of the changes Arizona implemented was requiring 2 human monitors in the car to oversee the "autonomous" vehicle. I don't recall the monitor facing any charges although I'm sure Uber fired her.


Part of the problem, is there doesn't seem to be any minimum standard for autonomous cars to meet. That is issue #1 in my mind, how good is good enough to be on the road. The developers like to point to their better than average human safety record, but it isn't really apples to apples. They are choosing the test areas. I'm pretty sure the accident rates are a lot lower in the suburbs of Tucson in off peak hours (where / when the Uber accident took place) than downtown LA during rush hour. If the cars are better than a drunk driver texting should that be good enough?


I'm not anti-autonomous cars, I just don't like the lack of standards being applied. Being better than the worst driver on the road sets the bar pretty low.
 
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Toadmaster said:
The person that is supposedly not needed? Even at that she seemed to react, just too slowly to prevent the accident, the car never responded at all until after it hit the pedestrian.
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Oh the person is needed. it's just not there yet. It was straight up a test, and the test failed horribly due to bad monitoring.

Toadmaster said:
Uber had lots of issues. One being their tech just doesn't work that well, it requires intervention at a rate many times higher than its competitors (like 10s of miles vs thousands of miles for Google).

It was also found that the Volvo they had modified probably would have avoided the accident with a human driver and its driver assist features, had Uber not disabled them. Of the 3 companies heavily invested Uber is clearly at the back of the pack and cutting corners.
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I cannot speak to that at all.

Toadmaster said:
One of the changes Arizona implemented was requiring 2 human monitors in the car to oversee the "autonomous" vehicle. I don't recall the monitor facing any charges although I'm sure Uber fired her.


Part of the problem, is there doesn't seem to be any minimum standard for autonomous cars to meet. That is issue #1 in my mind, how good is good enough to be on the road. The developers like to point to their better than average human safety record, but it isn't really apples to apples. They are choosing the test areas. I'm pretty sure the accident rates are a lot lower in the suburbs of Tucson in off peak hours (where / when the Uber accident took place) than downtown LA during rush hour. If the cars are better than a drunk driver texting should that be good enough?


I'm not anti-autonomous cars, I just don't like the lack of standards being applied. Being better than the worst driver on the road sets the bar pretty low.
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https://www.sae.org/news/press-room...utomation”-standard-for-self-driving-vehicles would be the standards currently.

in the case of tesla, they do not choose test areas for their neural net. What they did was turn on the cameras and other sensors in the car and record the information several months before they actually released autopilot. All of that data was fed into machine learning to tell the computer what was likely the best scenario. That got it to a point, then they turned it on with the beta moniker.

I completely agree that it's not ready for people to just let go of the wheel and be having sex in the drivers seat (though that has happened, and on video), but, at least in the case of tesla, it is quite good. broken down here because it's hard to read in a block -
  • It is not able to take a left at an intersection, for example, but it can certainly follow the road and even take an exit.
  • Supposedly it can stop at stop lights in the alpha, but I do not have that. Mine can stop behind another car and pick up again.
  • It definitely plays follow-the-leader, with the assumption that the person in front isn't going to be spectacularly stupid.
  • It DOES see well past where I can see - it can see in front of the car in front of me via bouncing the radar off the road (which, frankly, is black fucking magic), it can see all around it at once, and can distinguish if something is solid or not out to about 25 feet all around.
  • it knows lanes in a number of ways, and even can recognize construction zones and won't do certain things in the construction zones.
is a great video to watch.

also, I am not going to make any assumptions about your views on autonomous driving. that would start to get all icky. Mostly, I just have a lot of personal experience with it, I work at a national lab, was in the group that does machine learning, work sometimes with those folks, and have picked up a few things. I'm just happy to talk about it and give information as people would like. :smile:
 
As I recall one of the problems with it is it drives like the drivers manual and speed limits are the word of God. No speeding. Long following distances. Slows down so it has the actual reaction time it needs for conditions. Everyone around it goes beserk because that may be the rules but none of us actually follow them and can't handle a world where people do.
 
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